DataGravity Updates Security-Focused Data-Aware Storage Platform

DataGravity on Tuesday enhanced its DataGravity Discovery Series of storage appliances designed to help customers manage, analyze and protect data for business purposes.

DataGravity, which in August 2014 came out of stealth mode, is adding new predefined data tags, intelligent profiles and other capabilities to better manage customers' data requirements, said Jeff Boehm, vice president of marketing for the Nashua, N.H.-based storage vendor.

"Overall, this is about hardening the security capabilities to better secure the data as it's stored," Boehm told CRN. "Most breaches are caused internally, either by malicious actions by employees, or by inadvertent actions by employees. It's not a matter of building bigger moats around the data. It's about securing data at the core."

[Related: DataGravity Gets $50M Funding For Data-Aware Storage Platform]

DataGravity calls its DataGravity Discovery Series a data-aware storage solution, with the company's own intellectual property that focuses on bringing value to the data that businesses have stored. It provides search and discover capabilities on data, as well as information on who accesses it and when.

The company's storage appliances, which include flash storage acceleration optimization, provide both information discovery by conducting searches natively at the point at which data is stored as well as snapshot-based block, file and virtual machine data protection.

The new DataGravity Discovery Series V2 was enhanced with content and tag alerting, along with predefined and custom tagging, to provide automated email alerts of when and where sensitive data is stored and used to help find access anomalies and policy violations, Boehm said.

"We had simple tags before, but now we offer more predefined tags such as addresses," he said. "More important, we let users add their own tags to help them find data."

Also new to DataGravity Discovery Series V2 is intelligent profiles to allow compliance policy checks to be defined, assigned and scheduled for regulatory and internal governance policies, Boehm said. "This helps define what to look for in different data sets," he said.

DataGravity Discovery Series V2 also now does a better job of identifying and ignoring false positives, and provides audits of data access by user roles to ensure users are in line with compliance, security and governance policies, he said.

Also new are management packs for VMware vRealize Operations and Log Insight.

The DataGravity Discovery Series appliances are all-inclusive appliances that include primary storage, backup storage, storage services like deduplication, as well as all the data management and protection capabilities, said Will Urban, technical marketing manager for DataGravity.

Rich Shea, vice president of sales for DataGravity, said that, while the company's solutions are software-focused, it has no plans to offer a software-only version for deployment on third-party hardware.

"Envision a data stream coming in at light speed, then compressed, deduped, and broken into 400 different data types," Shea told CRN. "It is a complex operation with software, and would drag down performance. We do all this at the point where data is stored, all in-line and continuous."

DataGravity is turning out to be the kind of disruptive technology the market needs, said Will Adams, principal at ACS Services, a Brockton, Mass.-based solution provider and DataGravity partner.

It is the kind of technology that helps ACS Services, which is not a storage-focused partner, to work with storage clients, Adams told CRN.

"Other partners and vendors are in the market, making it a real dogfight," he said. "Unless we can get in with something disruptive, it's not worth it."

DataGravity relies on channel partners for 100 percent of its sales, Shea said. Those partners are key to bringing the technology to customers.

"One of our biggest challenges is evangelizing data-aware storage," he said. "We've brought security-aware capabilities to storage. So if you are a traditional storage player looking to grow your business, we can provide the technology you can take to security officers and chief information officers. And security resellers can now drag storage into their solutions."

PUBLISHED AUG. 11, 2015